What We Can Learn About Food from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo

If you haven’t seen the show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, now in its second season on the TLC network, then you’ve surely heard about it. The cloud of criticism that surrounds the antics of Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson—a sass-spouting seven-year-old pageant contestant—and her family’s life in rural Georgia, has ranged from eye-rolling disapproval to righteous condemnation for the family’s nose-picking, mud-wrestling, cheesy-ball-eating lifestyle.

The show’s producers have also been denounced for framing the show with establishing shots depicting stereotypical markers of low-class Southern life: outhouses, drainage canals, slow-moving railroad ticking through town, and humping dogs. Unsurprisingly, there is lots of food imagery too—in fact, what the Shannon/Thompson clan puts in their mouths is a main focal-point of the show. If there is one dish that characterizes their diet, it would be “sketti,” which June “Mama” Thompson calls her family’s favorite. ‘Sketti’ is spaghetti, boiled until it can stick to the wall when flung at it, sauced with a melted slurry of margarine and ketchup nuked in the microwave. It’s a dish that would make the Alice Water’s of the world clutch their pearls in horror.

The family’s diet is an easy target for reality-show masterminds looking to get a rise out of the folks at home, jeering while munching on organic pita chips. There’s an obvious emphasis on heavy, fried fare; vegetables are completely absent; throw-away pans and plates are used for every meal; and, most infamously, June pumps Alana full of “go-go juice”—a mixture of Red Bull and Mountain Dew—to escalate her energy before a pageant. Her recipe for canned cranberry sauce, sliced into rounds and doused in sugar, is about the closest thing they get to a salad.

Yet for all the nutritional woes of the Shannon-Thompson family’s meals, there is something earnest and admirable about some of their food habits. If we ignore the scripted dialogue and exploitative doctoring inherent in reality television, and instead take take Here Comes Honey Boo Boo at face value, we see a rich and engaged domestic sphere, one that can illuminate links between class and diet, poverty and health. Here are five things we can learn from the world of cup-a-farts, dogpiles, and monstrous five-pound pulled pork sandwiches.

How to feed seven mouths on a budget.

June boasts at being able to feed her family on eighty dollars a week. While this hardcore penny-pinching may not seem like a feat worthy of pride, it is the economic reality for a seven person, three-generation, one-bathroom household in McIntyre, Georgia. The man of the house, Mike “Sugar Bear” Thompson, works seven days a week in a chalk mine to support June, her four daughters, and the newest addition, Kaitlyn, June’s granddaughter. June is able to keep seven mouths satiated through extreme couponing and purchasing in bulk; she has even designated an entire room in their house as a ‘stockpile’ to store toilet paper, canned goods, and other staples bought in huge quantities at significant discounts. Few other shows on television depicts the practical realities of being working class in the rural South.

Roadkill = free protein.

The family’s grocery budget rarely covers the cost of meat, so when they can, they supplement their diet with road kill. When a deer or wild boar has been hit on nearby roads, neighbors will alert the family of a fresh kill. With the help of friends, they haul away the animal, cut and dress it, process the animal into manageable portions, and freeze for later use. June relies on this free source of protein as a valuable addition to their larder. With frank admission, June remarks, “Why spend money at the store when we know it’s fresher and cleaner at the side of the road?” It’s a true statement that would easily be validated by the public if it came out of the mouth of, say, Anthony Bourdain.

The wisdom of everyday cooking.

It’s rare to find a family that sits down to enjoy an evening meal together, and even more exceptional for that meal to be home-cooked. June puts out a hot meal for her family every night of the week (excluding the occasional trip to the local BBQ restaurant). Though she relies on heavily processed and canned ingredients, June is a quick and affable cook. “It ain’t gotta be perfect!” she tells the camera. “If you mess up a recipe, there’s always a re-do,” she says when suggesting appropriate substitutions for missing ingredients. June’s accessible recipes and easy-going kitchen demeanor has even sparked a TLC mini-series of “Cooking with June” videos. They may not be sitting at the dining room (the family congregates to dine while reclining on the living room sofa), but they’re all together and the TV isn’t on.

Southern staples for communal eating.

The scene-setting shots of comestibles tend to hover on the tubs of Country Crock margarine lying on the counter, bags of pork rinds sitting out, and kids tussling over spilled cheezy-balls, but the sturdy American fare that the family subsists on—like pork chop casseroles and “mashed potato multi-meals,” a Shepherd’s pie-esque bake of ground beef, cheese, and mashed potatoes—is common, recognizable food, most of it rooted in Southern tradition. If the freshly fried fish and hush puppies, the special pork chops June makes for a birthday meal, and the smoked brisket from the local BBQ joint were portrayed in a different light instead of being debased by the framing of the show, it would be desirable food—or at least the stuff of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, rather than something to be mocked. Macaroni and cheese is apparently profane when plated on Styrofoam, but acceptable when a chef charges $25 for it.

The importance of being comfortable in your own skin.

You can almost hear the collective snickering over the Shannon-Thompson family’s size, weight, and shape. The camera constantly focuses on the jiggles, bellies, and bodily emissions, especially of June, who is morbidly obese at more than 300 pounds. Before a family meal of BBQ, Alana declares proudly, “We’re fat!” Sugar Bear corrects her, “No, we’re pleasantly plump.” The family is not oblivious to the shameful gaze of the public and the producers; June cares about her family’s health and inspires a collective family effort to exercise and lose weight. When she sets up an exercise circuit for the girls, the jumping roping and sit-ups quickly collapse into gleeful wrestling. At the end of the day, it’s refreshing to witness a group of women so at ease with their shape—women who are comfortable in their own skin, and who joyfully embrace their bodies and all of their natural functions.

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